[Compendiums] What does it take to make?

So, I'm curious about what is needed to be able to create something like a Compendium, at least for Spells, for D&D3.5E OGL stuff. When I played, I played spellcasters, mostly Wizards, sometimes Clerics, on rare occasions Sorcerers.  I am sure I won't like copy-pasting the spells across, and have used an easily found a d20/D&D3.5E OGL site to use for links (which can provide links-upon-links to get you down to just what a specific term means... very handy) BUT... I'm sure others feel my pain here. It would be nice to at worst, have a 'rolodex' of Spells that you could dump into fields, even prebuilt database of them using Diana P's Character Sheet. That's without sitting down and grinding my fingers off trying to type up forests of OGL 3.5E monsters... So... what do you need to do? How colossal is the task? How many Tribesman could this middling Chieftain get to make this a lighter task?

The compendiums are setup by Roll20 at the moment. I think when they first came out, there was talk of giving the ability to make a custom compendium for your game, but I'm not sure that this is even still on the drawing board.

It's no compendium, and it's a ton of work, but I have made my own repository of spells for my 5e game. I made up a character sheet for each spell level of each character class and made macros for each spell. It's necessary to split them up that way, because of the way the spell DC's and attacks work with the 5E Community sheet. Of course the compendium has come out since I started this project and I have slowed in finishing it because I am thinking of switching sheets. Although we are towards the end of the campaign, < 6 months left, so I will probably wait to switch until we are done.  I'm am also super picky about the function and look of the spells and the compendium is missing some spells due to the nature of the OGL, so even with a new sheet I may go and make the database all over again. What it has allowed me to do is reference a spell like so %{Wizard-3|Fireball} It will cast the fireball spell as a wizard using the stats of the selected character's token, it will ask for the level spell slot used (a 5th ed thing), and it will output the damage and the save DC in the sheet's roll template format using modifications to the output based on my requirements. You can see I add a button for the saving and a link at the bottom the handout for that spell. I can also make a spell book for each character with buttons for each spell using the ability button format like so [Fireball](~Wizard-3|Fireball)  Anyway, like I said it's a ton of work but what I can do is use the character vault to transfer these spell repository character sheets to any other game I'm playing.   As a Pro subscriber there may be a spell input API option using a JSon with the database of spells for 3.5. That would be a good interim option. 

*sees the final line and watches it float waaaaaaaaay above my head* What I was thinking I might do is, at worst, a great big 'macro-base' that would utilise the roll templates.  BUT... It would be a lot of fiddly manual entry.  If I knew how to 'scrape' a site, I know one I could scrape them from... BUT... not that technologically advanced.

3.5e is a monumental task, i've been running my game for 2 years (ish) now and in that time I have written around 1.1k powercards for everything from spells to attacks to saves/abilities/skills etc. I've also built nearly 200 mook entries and numerous NPC's to boot, and that doesn't even start on the custom stronghold building and city management stuff i've developed! However, if you favour roll templates over powercards then a  kind user built a way to extract spell templates from pcgen which can take some of the pain away for some casters (i'm thinking clerics and druids who have altogether way too many spell options!). edit: Of course I've just noticed you've already posted in that thread and were fully aware of it already lol... D'oh!

Yeah, I looked at PCGen and I'm just not quite sold on it. I do like the resources available at d20SRD and if there was a good way to automatically import it, then great.  But until then it's a fair bit of manual shennanigans.  Potentially we could merge our efforts into some kind of single resource somewhere? I have no clue about Powercards, it's another thing on the big list of "Pro Stuff I should potentially learn" but for now I'm sticking with prebuilt stuff.  I don't know if people would want to buy a bunch of 'prebuilt' stuff for D&D3.5E. Are you running your own D&D3.5E sheet or Diana P's?

I run my own sheet (or more specifically I use Diana's sheet which I've 'tweaked' to suit my own devious needs... mainly a customised inventory tab and a feats and special abilities repeating section on the stats tab. I also don't use any of the inbuilt roll buttons (except in emergencies) since I wrote a billion powercards before roll templates were a thing and have no intention of going back lol. There are various threads with links to my powercards around but for convenience this is my  public front . Feel free to make a copy of it if you want to play around with it, the powercard generators could be reasonably easily converted to output roll templates I reckon?

As a temporary measure;  you could probably write up a single generic form-fill macro that asks the user for the details of the spells;  prompting for DC, range, effect, etc, etc  it would be a pain to use, but would allow the user to keep their own list of spells and fill in the blanks as needed. Just a temporary thing to get you by, mind you.

I'm just manually feeding information into macros from other sources, it's slow, but I was hoping there was a nicer way or people may have done a bunch of it already (or that Roll20 would basically have external collaborators building things like Compendiums).

Andrew said: Roll20 would basically have external collaborators building things like Compendiums. Riley has stated previously that compendiums for other OGL systems will happen at some stage, as well as a very real possibility of custom compendiums for homebrew systems etc. The stalling point thus far has been ensuring that the 5e one is solid, robust and complete in order to then use it as a model for the others. While I certainly can't speak for the dev team, and would never presume to do so... as per my mod oath ;) ... I still believe it to be on the road map, I'm just not entirely sure how far down that long, long highway it is. Like you though, I eagerly await the inclusion of a 3.5e compendium!